Diamond Dolls by Hormazd Narielwalla is based on a series of Hormazd Narielwalla’s signature collage images and explores themes of adornment, identity and transformation.

For the artist, as a young gay man growing up in India, Western culture hardly permeated. “It would seep in very gently, drop by drop. Then, in the 1990s MTV started broadcasting music videos from the West, and my first glimpse of David Bowie was from the 1970s, with his bright red hair and glass-like eyes. His beauty captured my imagination immediately.”

In the introduction to Diamond Dolls, John O’Connell explains that Bowie was “fascinated by the relationship between artifice and authenticity”. The singer’s shape-shifting ability to project different personas through dress, make-up and performance is the subject of Narielwalla’s images. His dancing dolls have at their basis the desire to explore transformation into another self. Working over a repeated template of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy’ face and dancing form, he has constructed 36 individual identities, each of which is defined by highly elaborate, decorative costuming. Cipher-like, the embellished figures carry references to the gender-fluid traditions of kabuki and onnagata, which were an influence on Bowie’s approach to challenging conventions about identity and sexuality. Conceived as a sculptural object in three parts, the book is the artist’s ninth in a series of award-winning publications.

A collaboration between Narielwalla, Concentric Editions and Eagle Gallery EMH Arts, it pushes the boundaries of lithographic printing into the territory of an art medium. Designed to stand like a series of shoji screens, it reflects many aspects of Japanese aesthetics that Bowie admired. The original collage images are reproduced both front and back to reveal the ‘artifice’ of cutting and pasting involved in their construction. Details – including the distressed gold foiling of page edges and abstract patterns debossed into the surfaces of the book covers – give the opening and arranging of the book a performative quality.

The publication was produced by Boss Print and features GF Smith Colorplan Bright Red in 270gsm for each ‘Act’ book cover, and the outer wrap is a Dubletta canvas which has been lined with GF Smith Colorplan Bitter Chocolate in 270gsm.